Movies on the Sails

About the Book

Why has a washed-up poet and soon to be washed-up first baseman named Ace High, lately washed up on the shores of Maui, suddenly become a private eye? At first glance, his job seems simple enough - find Henry Kupahu, the missing owner of his distinctly minor league baseball team, the Paradisiacs, at the request of Henry's wild young daughter, the ravishing Hanalei. But as the field of his investigation widens to include Hanalei's lover, a suave Polynesian racketeer named Chance Kahana who yearns to be a hotelier, and her brother, David, a radical separatist with an old-fangled plan for reclaiming his people's birthright, Ace finds himself with one foot in fair territory and one in the eighteenth century, eyeing a very nervous volcano. Then his long gone true love drops in out of the blue and all heaven threatens to break loose.

Chance wants Ace to find Henry to enlist his help in building a luxury resort and casino at Hana, on Maui's unspoiled east coast. David wants Ace to find Henry, despite being on the outs with his father. Hanalei says she wants Ace to find Henry, but wanting is what the girl does best. If everybody wants him found, how did he get so lost?

Will the Paradisiacs, a team that opens the champagne even when they lose, make it to the play-offs? Will Hawaii be returned to her old ways under the banner of a new king? Will Ace be able to gather the operatives of the vast and shadowy Way-Up, Firm and High-Tail It Bright Out of Town Detective Agency in time to capture the flag, save the island and the win the heart of the woman he has loved and lost and loved? And where the hell is Henry?

The answers lie in a tale both funny and lyrical, rollicking and romantic, and bound for the very heart of Hawaii. The ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson, drifting over the master's old island haunts, would recognize the roads this novel travels, the pathways of pure adventure. Welcome to a story that goes by like so many Movies on the Sails.

About the Author

Michael Larrain was born in 1947 in Los Angeles, California. He has published poems in dozens of journals and magazines, given hundreds of public readings, is rumored to be a senior partner in the notorious Way-Up, Firm And High-Tail It Bright Out of Town Detective Agency, and is the author of three published collections of poems: The Promises Kept In Sleep, Just One Drink For the Diamond Cutter and For One Moment There Was No Queen, as well as the underground classic pornographic-hippie-poet-private-detective-metaphysical-pirate-psychedelic-western-autobiographical-wino novel (with baseball overtones), South of the North Star. He makes his home in Sonoma County (California) where he lives with the woman he loves and has, for the past twenty-six years, run a roadside vending operation called Flowers Not To Reason Why.